Tapio Kelloniemi wrote:
> 1. The official alfs tool is required to be GPL
An OSI compatible license that allows more flexibility to use some of its parts to BSD - like projects could draw more attention to the project. GPL is fine, I
have no problem with it; in anycase a more flexible than the GPL license can help such a project / subprojects in long term. nZyme is not based on previous alfs
code base, it is a fresh start, so in anycase there are no backward compatibility issues with the GPL license. Do you mean that you require the tool to be
opensource? Opensource != GPL, infact there is a lot of non GPL - based opensource software.
> 2. At some point we may want to use a library which is under GPL
> (not LGPL, no exceptions) such as readline. If we choose anything but
> GPL, we can't do this.
Any OSI compatible license that offers the ability to modify / redistribute source code + binaries in a "free" as in "freedom" manner is not incompatible with
GPL. More like it is GPL that becomes incompatible with everything else eventually. This means that you can use BSD licensed software under GNU/Linux and
eventually mix it with various applications even at system level; GPL makes it practically impossible for it to work with other OSI licenses. Public - Domain
like licenses are much more "real" and effective opensource.
And just what if a company decided to help an opensource project but request a more flexible than GPL licensing scheme since they are _paying_ people to work on
it? PostgreSQL is not GPL, but it is something many companies cannot live without, especially since they are building apps around it.
> a library which is under GPL (not LGPL, no exceptions) such as readline.
My personal intention is to have a project that builds using only what the standard C++ offers, making maintenance of the source code fully self - hosted. Using
outside codebase would mean to have to adequate to the way of thinking of someone else that had not designed a particular library / whatever for this purpose.
In anycase I believe that this is a minor problem. From what I understand the LFS book is not under GPL license itself (is it?). Whether it is dual licensing or
whatever, the most important thing is to have the source code always available and give some credit to the fellas developing it...
Thank you for your response, I hope more people say something about this since the source tree in my personal depo is growing fast.
Whatever will the license be, I find it a non - issue, provided source code is always available; it is always useful to ask this before though so I know what
people actually think about it. For the time being I am just a bit skeptical about the GPL3 draft, that is all. That said, my personal favorite would be a BSD -
like option. I honestly do not know yet.
George Makrydakis
gmak
PS: Commercial Software is not the enemy; Patents are... and you cannot patent sunlight can you? :)